I know I have been promising it for a while, but tonight I will finally be getting around to liveblogging my reactions to the recently-aired series The Genius of Charles Darwin, hosted by Richard Dawkins. The title of this post should already give you an impression of what I thought of the series, although I was tempted to come up with some sort of title involving "Richard Dawkins and Friends" given the presence of his adaptationist compadres Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett.
If you haven't seen the documentary already, most (if not all) of it is freely available on YouTube, and if you have seen it I would encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments. Peter McGrath has already liveblogged all three parts (with special guest appearances, no less) and generally the reaction has been "Meh, it was alright, I guess." Rather than simply add to this chorus I'm going to try and correct some of what I felt were mistakes which pockmarked the series.
(I also should probably disclose that last night I read Niles Eldredge's Reinventing Darwin from cover-to-cover, so my views may be more colored than usual by my recent reading about who sits at the High Table of evolutionary theory. I've already used the term "adaptationist" in this post, so my particular bias should be clear.)
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
IMO, people should put "adaptationist" and "Dawkins" in the same sentence more often.
Posted by: Steve | August 21, 2008 9:45 AM
I had no idea this was mainly about adaptation. As a person who studies adaptation, I'm now much more interested in the series!
(But wait, how much Pinker is there ... a lot? That would be hard.)
Posted by: greg laden | August 21, 2008 10:05 AM
The Pinker and Dennett bits weren't the worst part, IMO: they didn't really get into problematic territory, and they weren't too long anyway. Stuff went wrong worse elsewhere.
All three parts are available via BitTorrent, if you want in on the critiquing action.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | August 21, 2008 10:43 AM
I was rather disappointed in the series, despite being a Dawkins fan, (in a small way).
I get the impression that some Channel 4 manager thought they ought to do something to celebrate Darwin, and because he's one of the few people most people have heard of - and he's sometimes controversial to boot - Dawkins was the man for the job. But that's where the thinking ran out. It was just badly made, with no clear idea of what it was supposed to be saying.
Posted by: SimonG | August 21, 2008 11:13 AM
I too was disappointed with the series, although it did have some great moments. I'm not 100% sure how much of the script was written by Dawkins and how much was written by some random script-writer.
Also, the interview Dawkins had with PZ Myers in the Voices of Science DVD was very interesting...during their evolution of evolvability discussion, Dawkins admitted that there may be something to clade selection. It was nice to see him talking about something other than natural selection and adaptation for a change.
Posted by: Justin Wagner | August 21, 2008 11:30 AM
It did feel like a bit of a missed opportunity - I didn't get any of the sense of the elegance of, and evidential support for, the theory of evolution. He did however reel-in the adaptationist stance: there was a nod to the "compromises of evolution" in the last of the three parts.
Dawkins reading out expletive-peppered hate mails was possibly my TV moment of 2008 though.
Posted by: Emma | August 21, 2008 12:09 PM
"(But wait, how much Pinker is there ... a lot? That would be hard.)"
He has one short interview with Steven Pinker. Said interview doesn't even really go into controversial territory.
Brian, you should probably read Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea if you haven't already; you know, for the other side of the adaptationist debate and all. ;) I will warn that it is somewhat...dense, though.
Posted by: Thomas M. | August 21, 2008 12:22 PM
Thanks for the comments so far, everyone. I brought up the "adaptationist" issue to stir up a little bit of trouble (especially since Pinker and Dennett show up in the documentary) but it is good to see that the pluralist approach is making some headway.
Thomas; I've read DDI as well as some "meta" books about the debate between Dawkins and Gould, specifically. The conflict has always seemed a little overblown to me, like what G.G. Simpson warned about in the introduction to Tempo and Mode. Still, it is interesting to note the difference since many of the most vocal people in the conflict (like Gould and John Maynard Smith) have passed away or otherwise dropped out of the debate, so maybe the ground is more fertile for a "reconciliation" that so many people engaged in it said they wanted.
Posted by: Laelaps | August 21, 2008 12:28 PM
That series just goes to show that the groves of academe are not without stands of petrified forest.
Posted by: vanderleun | August 21, 2008 12:40 PM
Emma:
I'm with you on that. Well, it'll have to compete with the finale of Avatar, but it was pretty damn good.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | August 21, 2008 1:48 PM
"I've read DDI as well as some "meta" books about the debate between Dawkins and Gould, specifically. The conflict has always seemed a little overblown to me, like what G.G. Simpson warned about in the introduction to Tempo and Mode. Still, it is interesting to note the difference since many of the most vocal people in the conflict (like Gould and John Maynard Smith) have passed away or otherwise dropped out of the debate, so maybe the ground is more fertile for a "reconciliation" that so many people engaged in it said they wanted."
I think you raise a good point, and frankly, I think Dennett's critique of Gould's behavior causing problems in terms of reconciliation and being damaging due to his need to start a 'revolution' were right on the mark. The quote he took from Dawkins (that P.E. always belonged within the neo-Darwinian synthesis) showed that even he was willing to compromise. If you can't already tell, I find Gould a bit off-putting at times. My primary problems are his approach to evo. psych., which I felt was rather dogmatic, and his insistence on being a pompous ass to legitimate intellectual opponents*. Try re-reading Dennett's "Bully For Brontosaurus" chapter from DDI and then read Gould's response More Things in Heaven and Earth followed up by the 'Darwinian Fundamentalism' exchange and you'll see what I mean. I love, love, LOVE his essays, but the man had an ego bigger than Dawkins.
For the record, I think that some of the problems with this series aren't Dawkins fault; for example, it came out in a response to an article posted on his website (criticizing his behavior in the first episode) that the lawyers forced him to throw out that he was an atheist early in the episode to establish his 'bias' in favor of evolution so they wouldn't be misconstrued as being unfair to creationists. With those kind of ridiculous editing ideas happening from the start, I have to question how much control he has over the script.
*When I say legitimate intellectual opponents I'm thinking of someone like Dennett who has taken the time to give themselves a broad education in the subject and make some nuanced arguments about it, as opposed to, say, a creationist.
Posted by: Thomas M. | August 21, 2008 2:41 PM
Mostly completely off-topic, my favorite Dawkins appearance was in the latest series of Dr. Who...who better to get on TV and tell the world that our planet has been moved to another part of the universe?
Posted by: Grant S. Boardman | August 21, 2008 3:07 PM
Fortunately, the RichardDawkins.net site lets you look up comments by a given user. A user going by the 'nym "Logiciel" wrote a comment which began as follows:
To which Dawkins replied as follows:
Weirdness.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | August 21, 2008 3:32 PM
I missed episode 2, but from what I could gather from the others, Dawkins quite likes to provoke opinions from everyone he interviews, which can be a good or bad thing. Good because it helps us understand different moral viewpoints, but bad because it seems like he is belittling and patronising them. Although I have no belief system/spiritual faith, I still respect (some of) those that do because they are otherwise nice people. When Dawkins was interrogating the Archbishop, he seemed to have that belittling attitude which was unnecessary, because the Archbishop practically said he believes in evolution, but that God plays/played a part in it. Fair enough, I would stop there and respect the man's beliefs, but he kept questioning him and that annoyed me slightly.
Also, for a series on Charles Darwin, I noticed very little Darwin-related content in the last episode, was that just me? It was mostly an addendum to the God Delusion, which of course he plugged several times. No real offence meant here to Dawkins, I admire his pluck and anyone who can bring important matters like evolution to the public eye is certainly admirable.
Posted by: Mo Hassan | August 21, 2008 6:39 PM
I only noticed one scene with the book (I've only watched the episode once, though). To my eye, moving beyond Darwin in the third part of a three-part series is reasonable enough — emphasizing all the discoveries we've made in the years since 1859 is, I believe, an unequivocally Good Thing. Putting Darwin's name on the product may be a regrettable necessity forced (They get you coming or going, though: either you're indulging in Darwinian hagiography, or you're not talking about Darwin like you had advertised you would. Heads I win, tails you lose.) The silly and entirely avoidable lapses, such as those Brian documented above, irritate me far more.
About the lawyer business mentioned above: I'd say that the third episode would likely have been the same without it. (This sort of counterfactual speculation can easily become completely pointless, but it's still fun.) Taken as a whole, the series would have been just as offensive to the Great Hair crowd, while changing the emphasis in the first episode might well have improved it. So, I think we rather lost all around.
There's some strange damn irony in the notion that a pusillanimous "respect everyone's right to their own truth" can lead to the TV programme being even more uppity and New Atheistical than it would have been otherwise. . . .
Posted by: Blake Stacey | August 23, 2008 3:44 AM
Oops, something got mangled there. What I meant to say was more like the following:
Posted by: Blake Stacey | August 23, 2008 3:53 AM